Scott predicts the future (again), real-life Ancestor project

For those of you who have listened to Ancestor, this article will scare the poop out of you. It's an almost word-for-word real-life version of the Ancestor plot. Check out this article in WIRED about scientists attempting to re-create the genome of the Ancestor of all mammals. No, I'm not making this up ...
And check out this one - a human-cow hybrid. This crap is downright spooky ...

Jesus Christ, that last bit sounded like "The Stand" by Stephen King. Just what we need, a virus from a hundred years ago that no one has any immunities against anymore, that even back then killed over 50 million people.
That scares me more than some rampant ancestor.
They probably stole that idea from you anyway Scott. You know it's true.

Goggalor:
The Infection is not some virus from a hundred years ago - after you listen to Episode 5, you may realized that this story is going in a totally new direction. Or not, you decide.
And ROBBIE:
That CD is the plague of my existence. You're right, I need help with fan stuff. I rip off Dawn and Drew for everything else, might as well rip them off for that as well ...

OK, I appreciate fiction but to claim this as "evolutionary science" takes more faith than any religion I know of.
I'd hate to be the only one to see the flaws in this system. Technically to "decode evolution", at least MACRO-evolution (what most people consider "real" evolution)would be impossible in this system.
You see, for a "rat like" animal to evolve into an elephant/whale/human the information within it's DNA (which would have BILLIONS of base pairs LESS than an elephant today) would be insufficient. It would require the DNA to have that infornmation ADDED to it somehow. Natural selection only chooses which pairs to keep based on the combined DNA of both parents. If that DNA didn't already exist then the offspring aren't going to simply CREATE it's own extra DNA. 100 million base pairs cannot mysteriously grow to 1 billion/2 billion/10 billion. That's called the "information theory". You have to start with the same amount or less information than you ended with. Which is why MICRO-evolution is possible. That is the changes that take place within an existing animal species. MICRO is the only evolution that is and ever will be observed. Because, it's the only kind that exist.
This model would be GREAT for tracing MIRCO-evolution. What they don't tell you in this article is that when he tested it out simulating the evolution "like nature" they ended with the same amount of base pairs as they began with. Which doesn't turn a rat into a professor.
I'm sorry to turn this into a science lesson, but it's this pseudo-science that been decieving people since the days of darwin. They make "fact" out of faith. And poor faith as it is.

I don't want to start a big Creationism argumement. However, increasing a genome by 10x isn't that hard. There are mechanisms where DNA is copied. Over time, one version of the copy is modified. Perhaps the chunk of DNA was for making a gall bladder. The organism grows two. One of the two morphs into a related function. A million years later, a never before seen functioning organ is there. Three doublings gets you 8x. Oh, and a million years is a long time. Especially for mice which have a new generation every year. An organism gets a bigger genome if there is an evolutionary advantage. If there is such an advantage, it doesn't take long to happen. Information theory supports Evolution. Modern medicine depends on it. If it didn't work, i'd be dead. Cogito, ergo sum. Sum, ergo Evolution works.

I understand exactly what you are saying and that "sounds" right.
Molecules-to-man evolution requires the production of large amounts of new genetic information. In searching for possible mechanisms, scientists have sometimes pointed to the ability of cells to make, and retain, multiple copies of their DNA. Every time a cell divides, the DNA is copied and the new copy is usually passed on to the daughter cell. But it can sometimes happen that the copy remains in the parent cell. When a whole set of chromosomes is copied and retained in this way, the condition is called â€˜polyploidyâ€™. Some defenders of macro-evolution have tried to claim that this is an example of the â€˜new informationâ€™ creationists ask (so far in vain) to see proof of, if macro-evolution is to have credibility. However, informed evolutionists generally realize that photocopying a page adds no new information; it just duplicates it.
However, many evolutionists have argued that this â€˜extraâ€™ DNA from chromosome duplication can provide at least the raw material for mutations to work on. The â€˜extra copyâ€™ is supposedly liberated to produce new genetic information by accidental change, in addition to the standard information in the original.
If this process had been an important factor in the â€˜evolutionâ€™ of life, then we should find that the number of chromosomes and/or the mass of DNA per cell would increase as you move up the Tree of Life. The organisms with the most DNA should have had the greatest exposure to mutation and thus the greatest opportunity for evolutionary advancement. Bacteria and other single-celled organisms should have the least amount of DNA, and complex organisms like man should have the most.
Is that what we find? Not at all. Some microbes have more chromosomes and more DNA than man. Man has only a modest 46 chromosomes, falling somewhere in the middle of the range that goes from 1 chromosome in an ant (quite an advanced organism compared to a microbe) to over six hundred in some plants.
Some â€˜variation within a kindâ€™ can occur by this mechanism. In chrysanthemums,1 for example, the regular number of chromosomes is 18, but 27, 36, 54, 72, 90 and 198 also occur, together with odd combinations like 19, 26 and 37. However, a chrysanthemum with 198 chromosomes is still a chrysanthemum. The variation appears to be limited to species differences within the genus. Within the palm family Arecaceae2 the standard chromosome number ranges between 26 and 36, except for one genus, Voanioala, which has around 600. It is not unreasonable to suppose that such extraordinary polyploidy has contributed to the separation of this genus from its related genera within the familyâ€”all from the one original created kind.3
But surprisingly, the all-time champion of genetic multiplication is a super-giant bacterium. Epulopiscium fishelsoni is the worldâ€™s largest bacterium. It is half a millimetre long and weighs in at a million times the mass of a typical bacterium. In fact no-one believed it was a bacterium until genetic tests proved it. And it has a whopping 25 times as much DNA as a human cell. The number of multiple copies of one of its genes has been counted and found to be no less than 85,000.4
It is hard to comprehend such numbers, and to think that it all happens inside a tiny little dot of one of the worldâ€™s â€˜simplestâ€™ organisms. But it is much easier to comprehend the fact that, even with genes copied 85,000 times, Epulopiscium fishelsoni is still a bacterium. Multiple copies of DNA do not explain the difference between the microbe and the man. It is the information contained in the genes, not the opportunities for mutation, that makes the difference.
Sorry for the ultra-long answer but this is fairly important, I believe.

I meant in the article, they were talking about re-creating viruses from the past, such as the flu virus that killed millions of people in 1908 (or something). I thought that was scarier than your Ancestor, probably because you can't dynamite a pandemic.